With Houdini now behaving on MacOs and therefore being able to be used for graphic design, first time since H13, I'm interested to hear any general views on where the viewport and Mantra have parity and where they fall apart.

As you can see in the attached screengrab, they are quite disparate.

Also, will H18 or Lops affect this too?

Thank you.

I hope that with the dedicated iPadOS for iPad makes easy enough to port Houdini…

I think whe should wait till H18 release, as hopefully it will affect the parity a lot (at least the Karma in viewport situations). Hopefully it will be responsive enough to use the live rendering for design work (this should be the goal). 3rd party renderers may do the job even better… Blender already does this with Cycles, even with sculpt tools (but without dynamic topology).

Mantra will be replaced with Hydra-compliant renderer, including Renderman.
So, the gap will be narrowed, or removed.

That sounds epic! Is that anything to do with the ‘Hydra GL’ or ‘Embree’ options coming in H18?